Hello everyone.

This post is here to introduce my new YouTube channel. I’m busy transferring all my old content to the new channel, and hope to upload new and better videos soon. To find this link in future, either add it to your bookmarks now, or check the EXTERNAL LINKS page on this blog!

My Channel 

Proof that it always pays to hunt around.

I’ve seen many pairs of antique binoculars at flea markets and antiques shops over the years, but while most were pretty reasonably priced, they were often in horrible condition. Covered in scratches, dents, cracked, scratched or chipped lenses, and jammed or faulty focusing mechanisms which left them impossible to operate.

But not these:

These are typical of binoculars produced in the late Victorian era, around 1870-1900. They were spectacular, and in fully functioning condition. I found them in a little antiques shop a few blocks from my house and I just had to have them. I know the shopkeeper fairly well and he let me have them for a discount to boot. I think they’re the most amazing and beautiful set of antique binoculars I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen quite a few! The brass body shines in the sun and the lenses are just amazingly perfect – not something that you often get with antique binoculars.

The sliding glare-shields had to be disassembled and cleaned and the felt linings inside had to be replaced (which was an easy fix), but other than that, they were in almost perfect condition.

They were made in Paris by Mohrson. That’s literally all I know about them. At one time they would’ve come with a strap, and most likely a case as well, but they’re long gone. Straps for binoculars like these are pretty simple, so getting a new one is unlikely to be a problem. I think they’re fantastic, and just had to share them.

They fold up pretty compact. Fully extended, they’re about six inches long, and they’re not so bulky that they’re difficult to operate, hold or use. All in all, a lovely pair of Victorian-era field glasses.

They also make a great photography prop! See?

You certainly find the strangest things at flea-markets, and I think this is definitely one of the stranger things that I’ve ever found in all my years of searching!

I couldn’t figure this thing out when I first saw it. It’s chrome plated steel or some such thing, and it folds up, like you see there. It also pops open like this:

There’s a hook at the back, and at the front there’s a magnifying glass, and the whole frame is riveted together. But what is it? When I figured out what the missing link was, it all made sense!

Hey, hey!! It’s a pocketwatch stand!

The whole point of this whimsical little device is that it folds up for travel, and it’s something that you’d take along with you when you went on a long journey. When you reached your destination, you opened the stand up, popped it on your bedside table, and hung your watch on it. There’s a magnifying glass at the front so that in the middle of the night, you can roll over in bed, look through the lens and read the time with minimal fuss!

Was it expensive? Nope! Are they particularly common or rare? I have no idea. I’ve seen many watch-stands, both new and antique, made of everything from brass to wood to solid sterling silver, but this is the first that I’ve ever seen with a magnifying glass on it!

Brief research suggests that these aren’t uncommon, but I doubt that anybody ever did a roaring trade in these things – Travelling watch-stands with magnifying glasses certainly did exist, but they were rarely anything more than the little trinket that this one was. It was probably just a cheap, convenient travel-object, even when it was brand new, which was probably sometime between 1890-1920 or 1930. It’s quirky though, and that’s why I had to have it!

Hello to all my friends and followers, and welcome to my new online home! After years of using WordPress.com, I’ve finally made the transition to a paid domain of my own.

This inaugural posting is here to assure you that all the contents from my old blog at ‘Not Yet Published’ have been successfully transferred across to their new home, and that you can expect more of the same in the days, weeks and months to come! So hang around and check things out, and all in good time, I’ll start posting more and more about the people, places, pieces and events that have shaped and influenced our lives…throughout history. 🙂

Fewer machines have made more of an impact on the world than the humble typewriter. For over a hundred years, this little machine was responsible for everything from newspaper-stories, film-scripts, some of the world’s greatest novels and stories, letters to loved ones and friends, and some of the most famous speeches of the past century.

The Birth of the Typewriter

Well…where did the car come from? Where did the lightbulb come from? Where did the electric telegraph come from?

We think the answer is simple and can be traced to the genius of one man. But as is often the case, the typewriter, just like with all the other things mentioned above, it was the contributions and discoveries and inventions made by lots of people that eventually culminated in one great, mutually-beneficial machine.

The idea of having a machine that could be operated by one man, and which could print out anything that the user wanted using movable type (hence the name ‘type-writer’), is an old one, and dates back at least to the 1700s. While people had been trying for hundreds of years to create a workable typing-machine, it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that real progress started to be made.

The Hansen Ball

This curious machine is the Hansen Writing Ball, so named for its spherical shape. It was invented in 1865 by a priest, Rasmus Malling-Hansen. Put into production in 1870, this was the world’s first commercially-available typewriter.

The Hansen Ball was typing genesis. It was the first real typewriter. But like anything that’s the ‘first real’ of anything, the Hansen was still very much a prototype of things to come, and came with a number of annoying shortcomings. The most obvious one is that, due to the arrangement of the keys, it’s damn near impossible to read the text of what you’re typing while the paper is in the machine. It was pretty clear that something better had to be invented.

The World’s First Typewriter

Behold the first-ever commercially successful typewriter:

What you are looking at is the Sholes & Glidden typewriter. The world’s first really successful typing machine, developed in 1867. It has the familiar type-bars up the top with the roller, and the keys and the spacebar down the bottom in front of the typist. Laid out in this now-familiar manner, this typewriter became wildly popular because it was easy to use, had everything designed in an easy-to-see layout, and was the first typing machine with the now-standard “QWERTY” keyboard (where does ‘Qwerty’ come from? Take a look at the first six letters at the top left of your keyboard in front of you).

The QWERTY keyboard was designed to stop typewriter typebars jamming together by spacing out the keys and typebars of the most frequently-used letters in the English language.

Sholes and Glidden were the men who invented this machine – Christopher Latham Sholes and his friend, mechanic Carlos Glidden. With assistance from printer Samuel Soules, the three men put together their new machine in a workshop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A.

In time, their prototype was ready and was unveiled in 1873. Try as they might, the men couldn’t mass-produce their typewriters, and so they sold it to
a firearms manufacturer.

This firearms manufacturer was looking to make more things than just guns. They were already making mechanical sewing-machines, and they saw this new ‘typing-machine’ as the next big thing, and snatched it up.

The name of this company?

E. Remington & Sons.

To this day, Remington typewriters are still considered among the best in the world, along with Ollivetti, Royal and Smith-Corona.

The Sholes & Glidden typewriter was renamed the Remginton No. 1. Although it was fairly practical, it still had a few shortcomings – you were still unable to see what you were typing on the paper. And the typebars only had capital letters on them. But it was at least better than the Hansen Writing Ball.

Improving the Typewriter

The Remington No. 1. was successful, but only moderately so. The shortcomings mentioned above slowed its acceptance by society, and the relative complexity of its operation meant that special people (typists!) had to be trained in using this new machine.

By the the 1880s and 90s, typewriters had improved markedly in design. Now, you could see what you were typing as you typed, due to a rearrangement of the typebars and the manner in which they struck the paper. You could type in both upper and lowercase letters and typebars didn’t tangle up and jam as much as they uesd to. By the turn of the century, the modern mechanical typewriter as we know it, was developed.

The Impact of the Typewriter

The impact of the typewriter was amazing. For the first time in history, a person could write faster than what he could with a pen. He didn’t need to keep dipping his dip-pen into an inkwell. His writing remained neat, constant and level throughout the entire word…sentence…line…page…document!

The typewriter made everything faster, neater, easier and more standardised and uniform. The typewriter also saw the entrance of women into the business workforce for the first time. Secretaries hammered away at their machines, typing out copy and speeches, reports, essays and memoranda. The typewriter was changing everything.

Once, writers had to handwrite everything. Now, they could type it up. Some of the greatest stories in the world were typed up on typewriters, and some typewriter-brands became famously associated with various authors.

Typewriter Lingo

Ever since the 1980s, the typewriter has become less and less of a business machine or desktop staple, and more and more a historical curiosity. But to this day, we still use a lot of typewriter jargon in our everyday lives.

Don’t believe me?

C.C.

You see this on your email textboxes all the time. “C.C.”, stands for “CARBON COPY”. In the days of typewriters, to make a carbon-copy meant to sandwich two pieces of paper around a sheet of carbon-paper. All three pieces of paper were then cranked into the typewriter. When a typebar struck the ribbon, the ink would imprint itself onto the first sheet. The force of the typebar hitting the page would press some of the dye out of the sheet of carbon-paper and imprint the same letter onto the second sheet of paper behind it. This second sheet of paper would be called the ‘carbon-copy’.

Return/Enter

The most important key on a keyboard. It opens windows, closes folders, starts new lines, begins movies and does so many things in computer-games.

But have you ever noticed that this oh-so-important key, locted on the right of your keyboard, isn’t always called ‘ENTER’?

On some keyboards, it’s called ‘RETURN’.

Why?

The ‘Return’ or ‘Enter’ key is descendant from the typewriter, back when you started a new line and returned the carriage to the extreme right by pulling on the carriage-release & return lever.

Shift

Aah, the shift-key. The bane of civilised internet-users.

But why is it called a shift-key?

The Shift Key, the one that transforms your lowercase letters into CAPITALS, is a holdover from typewriter days. It gets its name because pressing this key on the typewriter quite literally ‘shifted’ the keys. It moved the basket (the semicircular collection of typebars) up so that when a key was pressed, the capital of a letter would strike the ribbon and mark the paper, instead of its equivalent lowercase letter.

The hammerheads of all typewriter-bars actually have two letters (or other appropriate symbol on it) instead of one. The regular letters or symbols struck the ribbon and paper when the typewriter was in default mode, but pressing the shift-key shifted the basket so that capital letters (or symbols such as the $-sign or the &-sign), on a particular hammerhead would strike the ribbon and paper instead.

Back then, just as today, the Shift key was operated by the pinky-finger. Today, it’s pretty easy to hold down Shift and just TYPE LIKE THIS.

But try doing that with a mechanical typewriter and you’ll probably sprain something. So to combat this, you had…

CAPSLOCK

The Shift-Lock or Capitals-Lock (“CAPSLOCK”) key was introduced to hold the basket of typebars in the capitals-position while typing out headings or other parts of a document that had to stand out. This function allowed the typist to type out long sections of capitalised text without putting extra strain on the pinky-fingers which would otherwise have to have held the shift-key (and the entire basket of typebars) in-place while this operation was completed.

Backspace

Typewriters have the famous shortcoming of not allowing the typist to delete or remove previously typed text. And yet…they have a key called ‘Backspace’, a key that, if pressed on a modern computer keyboard, deletes previously-typed letters.

So what’s the point?

The backspace key shifted the carriage back one or more typespaces when it was necessary to type in more text on a particular line (such as when filling out forms and so-forth).

Typewriter Components

Typewriters are complex machines. What are the various elements of a typewriter called?

The bed of keys is obviously the keyboard. The long thing that slides back and forth along the top of the machine is the carriage. The semicircular row of typebars (that fly up when a key is pressed) is called the basket. The two rollers on either side that scroll in the paper are called the platen-knobs. The round drum on the top of the carriage which the paper curls around is called the platen. The tray behind the platen which the paper rests on is the paper-table.

On the left of the carriage are two levers. They are the carriage-release lever, and the carriage-return lever. The release-lever sends the carriage back to the starting position. The carriage-return lever starts a new line. More modern typewriters chucked out the return-lever and the carriage-release lever performed both functions simultaneously.

The two tabs that held the paper against the platen (to stop it wiggling around) were called the paper-fingers. To get the paper-fingers to release their grip on your hard work, you had the paper-release lever. To shift the carriage freely from left to right, you had the secondary carriage-lever, that allowed you to unlock the carriage and move it freely and then lock it back into place and resume typing (handy for creating centered headlines, lists, etc, without constantly pressing the spacebar and wasting valuable inches of ribbon).

When a key was pressed, a typebar would fly up and strike the ribbon and mark the paper. The middle of the typewriter, between the two round ribbon-spools had a small square or rectangular window set into it, which each key would aim for when it hit the paper. This was the type-guide. It did double-duty in ensuring that every key would hit the same spot and create a neat line of text, and it also held the typewriter ribbon in place, to stop it wiggling around and causing the typebars to miss it when they hit the paper.

For the typewriter to print the stuff that you wanted onto the paper, you had the typewriter ribbon, the ribbon that ran around the two ribbon-spools on either side of the typewriter, and which was impregnated with ink. Most ribbon-spools were two-toned. Black, and Red, depending on the colour of ink you wanted to use.

Last, but not least, you had every typewriter’s most famous component.

The warning-bell.

The point of the warning-bell was not to tell you to stop immediately and start a new line. The purpose of the bell was to tell you that you were reaching the end ofthe page. When the bell rang, you were obliged to finish typing your current word, then pull the carriage-release and push it back to the start to begin the new line.

The Evolution of the Typewriter

The typewriter lasted for over a hundred years. Well into the 1980s and 90s. It wasn’t until computers became really practical that typewriters stopped being used. But until then, you had everything from mechanical typewriters, electromechanical, totally electric typewriters…made from steel and then increasingly out of plastic, with all kinds of features that people invented and added to these machines to try and make them as practical and as efficient as possible.

I’m just old enough that when I was a child, I learnt to type, not on a computer, but actually on a typewriter. I used my parents’ old Canon electric typewriter to do my homework and type stories on. I still remember the electronic ‘Beep!’ of the warning buzzer and pressing the ‘Return’ key and watching the carriage slide back to the start-point. I even remember learning to change the typewriter ribbon by myself when the machine ran out of ink, and unravelling old ribbons and holding them up to the light to read all the words I’d typed on them!

Gosh, typewriters are fun to muck around with when you’re 10 years old…

Desktop and Portable Typewriters

The typewriter, just like the computer, came in two varieties. The desktop typewriter, and the portable typewriter. It’s pretty easy to tell which is which, purely based on size.

This is a desktop typewriter:

Made of solid steel, as you can see, this Remington 12 is quite a monster. These typewriters were so huge and heavy that in some cases, carpenters would build special typewriter desks just to support their massive weight, and to cope with the vibrations caused by thousands of keystrokes and hammer-strikes every single day.

It’s probably not surprising then, that typewriter manufacturers created portable typewriters.

This is the Remington Portable #7. As you can see, it’s MUCH smaller and more compact than the much chunkier and heavier desktop model up above. These typewriters were designed for journalists, teachers, office-workers and writers who did a lot of travelling. They were the laptop-computers of their day. And just like laptops, they came with their own carrying-cases.

The Typewriter Today

The typewriter finally ended in the 1990s when practical home-computers began to take over and the typewriter was consigned to history. But that doesn’t mean they’re forgotten. A lot of famous writers today still use them. Until he died a couple of years back, children’s author Brian Jacques (pronounced ‘Jakes’), creator of the fuzzy little Redwall series, would type up all his stories on a mechanical typewriter (because he found computers too complicated to use). Actor Tom Hanks is an avid typewriter collector.

Blind people still use a variation of the typewriter today. Perhaps you’ve seen one of these?

It’s called a Perkins Brailler. It’s a typewriter for the blind, and many blind people still use them today. Made of solid steel, these machines punch out the raised dots known as ‘braille’, which blind people read with their fingertips. The six keys, pressed in various combinations, punch out the six-dot braille code into special, extra-thick braille-paper (ordinary paper doesn’t work on a brailler because the force of the keys punching into the paper would rip it to pieces). The sliding toggle on the top is the carriage. Pressing on it slides it back to the left, or to any other point along the line, allowing a brailler to start typing on any point of the page.

I used to be acquainted with a number of blind students and although I never used one, I saw Perkins Braillers on a regular basis. They’re probably the closest thing to a typewriter still used on a daily basis today.

Last, but not least, let us never forget one of the most indelliable marks that the typewriter has left on modern society. A little piece of music written by composer Leroy Anderson in the middle of the last century, simply called…

‘The Typewriter’:

…A piece of music that can only be played successfully with a vintage mechanical typewriter (they’re the only ones which create enough noise, and which have the distinctive sounds to work with the music).

Soft drinks are something we take for granted today. Everything from sparkling mineral-water, soda-water, tonic-water, lemonade, Sprite, 7-Up, Fanta, Solo, Irn Bru and the most famous soft-drink of all…Coca Cola.

But where did all this start? How did mankind one day discover that cold liquids would suddenly taste amazing and refreshing if they were merely carbonated? When were the first soft-drinks created and what did they originate as? How did they develop from curiosities and cures, to one of our most beloved and addictive beverages today?

This article tracks the development of the modern soft-drink from its birth as a medicine in the 18th century, to its mass consumption by its worldwide fizzy fandom in the 21st.

The Birth of Hydrotherapy

In the 18th and 19th centuries, medicine was crude. It was a mix of folklore, misguided science and age-old superstitions which on the whole…did nothing. Medical theory was advancing in this time, but cures for disease were few and far between and were of wildly varying effectiveness. People who suffered from anything from asthma to stomach-pains to muscle-pains would take a whole range of weird and scary potions, pills and concoctions to try and alleviate their discomfort and pain. However, the medicines prescribed by pharmacists and doctors were often unpleasant, either to look at, or to taste…in many cases, both!

It was in an effort to find cleaner, more comfortable ways to medicate the body that hydrotherapy was developed.

Hydrotherapy, or ‘water-therapy’, is the use of naturally mineralised waters, to cure various complaints. Mostly, it was used for muscle and joint pains. In cities such as Bath in England, it became fashionable to visit large public baths and springs which were filled with natural mineral-water to soothe joint-pains. This activity was known as ‘taking the waters’, from which the title of this article is derived.

The Rise of Medicinal Water

As hydrotherapy progressed, bathhouses and spa-retreats started popping up. Combined with a good diet and regular exercise, people began to recognise the benefits of water. Immersing oneself in a bath of cold water had the effect of increasing the heartrate, stimulating muscles and relieving joint-pain. Mineralised water was considered so beneficial that people began drinking it, as well as bathing in it. As early as 1661, the natural mineral-water available in the city of Bath was being bottled and sold for its ‘healthful benefits’.

However, there was some truth to mineralised and medicated water. And we should like to hope so. For without it, modern soft-drinks would not exist.

The first of these new waters was ‘soda water’.

Also called sparkling water or carbonated water, soda-water was created in the mid 18th century by a man named Joseph Priestly. In an experiment conducted in 1767, Priestly held a bowl of water above a vat of fermenting beer. The carbon dioxide released from the beer was impregnated into the water. Priestly called this vapour ‘fixed air’, and wrote about his experiements. He soon discovered that cold water impregnated with carbon dioxide had a pleasant, fizzy and sweet taste, and so experimented with finding a way to reproduce this effect. By dripping oil of vitriol (an old name for sulphuric acid) onto chalk, he could create carbon dioxide gas. By forcing this gas into water, he could create the world’s first soft-drink…

…soda water.

Although Priestly invented soda-water, the world’s first soft-drink, and recognised that it tasted wonderful, that was more or less all he did. It would take another man to put a marketing angle on Priestly’s invention and introduce it to the world. That man was an 18th century German watchmaker and scientist. A man named Johann…Jacob…Schweppe! And so…the world’s first soft-drink manufacturer, Schweppes, was founded in 1783.

The next step up from plain soda-water was a step away from commercial beverage-manufacturing, and a return to mankind’s original experiments with mineralised waters…to find cures for disease. Their first major breakthrough came in the mid 19th century with the invention of…

Tonic-water.

The word ‘tonic’, although rarely used today, still has medicinal connotations. And well it might, for that was precisely what it was meant to do. Tonic-water was invented when chemists put a small amount of quinine-powder into carbonated water. As quinine is very potent, only a small amount of it was added to a relatively large amount of water (only a few grains to each bottle), but the effect was amazing.

Apart from giving the water a distinct and slightly bitter taste…that tonic-water still has today…the water, thus treated with quinine, was now very effective in combating one of the most feared diseases that ravaged the African continent (and other tropical areas) during the 19th century – Malaria. It was for this reason that this quinine-infused water became known as ‘tonic-water’, because it was quite literally a ‘tonic’ (medicine) for malaria.

Tonic-water is relatively easy to make. You add quinine-powder, citric acid and baking-soda to a bottle of water. You seal the bottle tightly and invert it to mix the powders and dilute them in the water. The quinine is diluted with the water while the baking-soda reacts with the citric acid to let off carbon-dioxide gas. The gas, sealed inside the bottle, carbonates the water, thus creating carbonated tonic-water. Although a relatively easy process, the somewhat trial-and-error nature of making carbonated water this way was that the pressure of the gas could vary according to the quantities of baking-soda to water. If the pressure was too high, the bottle could explode in your hands!

One risk of bottling soda-water was that the corks used to seal the bottles could dry out and shrink, compromising the seal (and turning the cork into a dangerous missile if the pressure in the bottle managed to shoot it out). Some soda-water bottles were deliberately designed so that they couldn’t stand up straight. That way, the soda-water kept the cork damp and the swollen cork would keep the bottle tightly sealed.

Citrus Drinks

The next step up from creating cold, fizzy water was…creating cold fizzy water with flavour! With methods for safely and effectively manufacturing carbonated water now in place, the 18th and 19th century saw the rise of our first flavoured soft-drinks. The most famous of these was…lemonade!

Lemonade is created in several ways. Some use carbonated water, some use still water. In recipes calling for still water, baking soda was used to carbonate the water and lemon-juice and sugar was used to give it that sweet and sour lemony-taste that we all recognise today. Other fruits such as oranges and limes were also used to give plain carbonated water a different and more interesting taste.

The Most Famous of All: Coca Cola

Although famous today for being sickeningly sweet, conspicuously browny-red and for causing everything from pimples to dental problems to obesity and for being used for everything other than drinking, from cleaning toilets to removing blood…Coca Cola was actually invented as a medicine!

Coca-cola, or ‘Coke’ was invented in the state of Georgia in the United States in 1886. It was originally an alcoholic beverage called ‘Pemberton’s French Wine Cola’ and was created by a chemist named…John Pemberton.

Coca-Cola changed from its alcoholic form to its non-alcoholic form in the very year it was invented. In 1886, the temperance movement was beginning to gather steam and prohibition came to Georgia. Unable to sell alcoholic beverages, Pemberton instead marketed his new wonder-beverage as a medicine. Among other things, Coca-Cola was designed to cure headaches, impotence and drug-addictions!…An interesting claim when you consider that the drink famously gets is name ‘Coca-Cola’ because one of the main ingredients was…cocaine!

Mmmm…Healthy!

Originally sold over-the-counter by the glass, Coca-Cola was sold in bottles starting in 1894. Cocaine was removed from the drink’s recipe in 1903, but nevertheless, the name ‘Coca-Cola’ remained.

Drinks for a New Century

From their birth in the 18th century to their acceptance as a refreshing drink in the 20th century, soft-drinks underwent many changes. By the early 1900s, soft-drinks really began to rise in popularity. Temperence movements around the world meant that people, unable to buy alcohol, started drinking soft-drinks instead. Soda-fountains, manned by the ‘soda-jerk’ (so called because of the jerking-action used to operate the levers which carbonated the drinks with gas and which dispensed the aerated beverages) became increasingly popular. Soft-drinks were cheap, refreshing, delicious and easy to buy. A bottle of Coca-Cola cost about five cents in the early 20th century.

But why are soft-drinks called ‘soft’ drinks? This name was given to them to differentiate them from ‘hard’ drinks, meaning alcoholic beverages, as opposed to ‘soft drinks’, those which were non-alcoholic.

Soon, new flavours and brands of soft-drinks began to emerge, both on shelves and under soda-fountain counters all around the world. ‘Pepsi’ was first established in 1898, ‘7Up’ was created in 1929. ‘Fanta’ was invented during the Second World War in 1941. ‘Sprite’ and ‘Sunkist’ showed up in the 1960s and 70s. In keeping with soft-drink’s ‘medicinal origins’, ‘Pepsi’ (named for the pepsin enzyme which it contained) was supposed to aid the digestion of those who drank it. Of course, like Coca-Cola it didn’t actually do this, but Caleb Bradman, the man who invented Pepsi, liked to think that it did.

In the 21st century, soft-drinks continue to be enjoyed by millions of people all over the world, every single day. From its beginnings as a health-drink and tonic through its evolution as a healthy and tasty beverage, to a refreshing and invigorating drink to everyone’s favourite fizzy thirst-quencher, soft-drinks have remained in the public eye for the best part of nearly three centuries.

The history of dynamite is one of construction, destruction, death, invention, innovation, trial, error and inspiration. A history worth reading about.

Who Invented Dynamite?

The inventor of dynamite was a man named Alfred Nobel. Nobel was born in Sweden in 1833. In 1851 at the age of 18, Nobel moved to the United States of America to study chemistry. As a child, his family had travelled extensively through Europe and he had learnt several languages. He spent four years in the United States and returned to Sweden in 1855. When his father’s family business collapsed, Alfred devoted his studies to the manufacture, use and safe detonation of explosives and through trial and horrendous error, came upon the single explosive that was used so extensively for the next century that, even though it’s considered outdated today, is still considered…dynamite!

19th Century Explosives

The 18th but increasingly the 19th century, saw the boom-years of the Industrial Revolution. Literally. A lot of things were going ‘Boom’ in the 1800s. The transcontinental railroad across the USA was being built, in Australia and California, gold-rushes were driving people crazy trying to get rich. In Seuz, a great canal was being dug through the earth. In England, London’s famous ‘Underground’ railroad system was being built.

But for all this to be possible…for all the tunnelling, blasting, mining, trenching, dredging and excavation to be made possible…people needed explosives. To chip away at rock for hours was ineffective when you could instead blast the rock apart and then just simply carry away the leftover pieces. Easy in theory, very difficult in practice.

There were two main explosives in the mid 19th century. Blackpowder and Nitroglycerine.

Blackpowder had been used since the 1600s for construction-work and mining. People drilled holes into rockfaces, filled them with blackpowder, trailed a fuse, lit it and let the explosion do its work. But blackpowder was relatively weak. It was designed for use firing rifles, cannons, pistols and muskets…not blasting holes in rock. This ancient recipe of charcoal, sulphur and potassium nitrate, had to be replaced with something more effective.

That more effective something was invented in 1847 by an Italian chemist named Ascanio Sobrero. Although he was actually trying to create a medicine at the time, Sobrero’s discovery nearly blew his hands off! He had unwittingly invented an oily, liquid explosive which he called…nitroglycerine.

Nitroglycerine has an explosive power eight times what blackpowder of a similar quantity could produce and people were quick to see that this could blast and tunnel and mine and build and quarry, a hell of a lot more effectively than old-fashioned gunpowder. However, there was a problem.

Nitroglycerine is notoriously and lethally unstable. Because it is a contact-explosive which detonates from sufficient agitation, the slightest shock, bump or jolt can cause it to blow up. Because of this, using, but even moreso, transporting, nitroglycerine was extremely dangerous. For nitroglycerine to be used in construction of major engineering projects, it was necessary to have a chemist on-site to mix the concoction for you, then and there, when you needed it. Transporting nitroglycerine to a construction-site by a bumpy, jolty, shaky and vibrating horse and cart was a sure recipe for disaster on a monumental scale.

The biggest problem, apart from this, was nitroglycerine’s unpredictable nature. People knew it was unstable and that a jolt could cause it to blow up, but the problem was…they didn’t know how much of a jolt. You could strike a bottle of nitroglycerine with a hammer and nothing could happen. Or you could jump up and down with a bottle in your hand and it would blow up in your face.

It was for all these reasons, it’s legendary instability and frustrating upredictable nature, that a safer explosive had to be found. Something that could be safely transported, safely carried, safely detonated without the risk of exploding unexpectedly.

Alfred Nobel’s Blasting Cap

Nitroglycerine was wonderful stuff. Used properly, it could speed up construction-work on major public-works projects, it could allow people to mine faster and more effectively or blast and split rocks apart for quarrying that much easier. But its unpredictable nature meant that it was very hard to use it properly. Anyone who handled nitroglycerine was in deadly danger of being blown to smithereens. It was to prevent this and to make nitroglycerine easier to use, that Alfred Nobel invented his blasting-cap.

Before Nobel came along, everything about nitroglycerine spelt doom and destruction. First you had to transport it. If your wagon hit a bump, the entire transport of explosives could go up like a nuclear-bomb. Then you had to carry it to where you needed it. One trip or careless jolt and you became a statistic. But then you had to actually detonate it.

People did this in various ways back in the 19th century. One way to detonate nitroglycerine, as many people knew…was just to give it a jiggle. Enough agitation and the quantity of nitroglycerine in question would explode! But nobody really knew just how much agitation it required. And to agitate the mixture, they needed to be near to it. And nobody wanted to be next to nitroglycerine when it exploded.

The other way for nitroglycerine to be detonated was to pour it onto a surface…lay a fuse…light it…and run like all hell. The problem with this is, one stray spark could set off the mixture prematurely and send you flying into the air (or worse). Clearly, there were a few occupational hazards to using nitroglycerine.

Alfred Nobel examined nitroglycerine and decided to try and combine these two methods of detonating nitroglycerine. He recognised that sufficient agitation would cause it to explode. And he also recognised the danger of an open flame or an unpredictable fuse. To try and make this safer, Nobel created his blasting-caps.

Nobel’s blasting-caps were simple, really. They used mercury fulminate (a shock-detonated explosive like nitroglycierine) to create a chain-reaction. Exploding a small amount of mercury fulminate in a metal precussion-cap produced enough of a shock to detonate any nearby nitroglycerine. Nobel’s invention made it easier and safer to detonate nitroglycerine without the need to be connected to the nitroglycerine (such as holding onto a rope and jiggling a bottle) and without the need for open flames from fuses or matches.

Transporting Nitroglycerine

Nobel’s blasting-caps, invented in 1862, were a success insofar as they allowed for safe detonation of nitroglycerine. They did not, however, solve the far more dangerous issue of how to transport nitroglycerine.

Because vibrations, jolts and shocks can cause devastation to anyone transporting nitroglycerine, elaborate measures were taken to try and package it so that it was transported in as shock-proof a state as possible. An article in the Titusville Morning Herald of the 15th of October, 1870, said that…

“…The use of nitroglycerin has become so common, and the casualties resulting from any accidental explosion of it have been so frightful, that any improvement which adds to the safety of its transportation and storage deserves any encouragement. Mr. Nobel, the most extensive manufacturer of it in the world, whose name is everywhere associated with the improved explosive agents of the day, adopts the practice of mixing it with alcohol. This is said to make it perfectly harmless, so that a rifle ball may be fired into it, or a percussion cap explode in it with perfect safety. The simplicity of this process, and of that which restores its explosive qualities, recommends it as much as does the safety of the prepared article.

If water be added to the solution, the nitroglycerin immediately sinks to the bottom, and is drawn off for use. In the prepared state, it is packed in hermetically sealed cans, thus preventing the evaporation of the alcohol, which would restore its dangerous qualities to the nitroglycerin, and it may be sent to any distance, and in any climate without the risk of explosion…”

Trying to find a safe way to transport nitroglycerine and to use it became something of an obsession with Alfred Nobel. In 1864, his younger brother Emil Nobel was killed in a nitroglycerine explosion that destroyed their factory. While he was having more and more success with his explosives, Alfred needed something that was much better, more effective and a lot safer. He was beginning to pay the price for his dangerous occupation as an explosives manufacturer.

Inventing Dynamite

Dynamite was finally invented in 1866 when Nobel discovered a substance that would, at the same time bind nitroglycerine together so that it didn’t have to be transported as a liquid in fragile glass bottles, and which would render the explosive harmless until it was ready to be used (or at least, harmless if handled with common sense). This substance was…earth!

Or to be precise, it was diatomaceous earth, also called diatomite, a special type of soft soil a bit like sand. Among its other properties, this earth was very absorbent and was therefore wonderful for mixing with nitroglycerine. Anyone reading this who has a pet cat might recognise this substance…that’s right: Alfred Nobel’s famous invention is a lethally unstable explosive…mixed with kitty-litter! And there is even a legend about how this discovery was made. It was an accident!

To transport nitroglycerine safely, bottles and jars of the stuff were packed into crates and the hollows between the jars were filled with diatomite sand, to cushion the jolting of transportation. When workers were unloading some nitroglycerine near Nobel’s factory one day, they accidently dropped one of the crates! Fearing for their lives, the men bolted! When the cate did not explode, they returned to inspect the damage, which was minimal. Some of the lower jars had broken from the impact, but the sand had done its job and prevented an explosion.

Nobel, searching for a substance to add to nitroglycerine to render it harmless until the time of planned detonation, examined the sand used in packing the nitroglycerine. He experimented with the nitro-infused sand and discovered that if the mixture had a fuse or blasting-cap applied to it, it would detonate, but was otherwise rendered inexplosive due to the sand mixed in with the liquid nitroglycerine.

After further experiments, Nobel had created what he initially called “Nobel’s Blasting Powder” in 1867. His ‘powder’ was created out of a ratio of 3:1 of nitroglycerine to diatomite sand. At last, people had a safe explosive that was as powerful as nitroglycerine but which had none of the instability. The liquid nitroglycerine was mixed in with the earth and the resulting paste was formed into sticks which were wrapped in waxed paper. Using dynamite was as easy as inserting a blasting-cap into the end of the stick of dynamite, trailing away a fuse and then lighting it. The fuse would eventually set off the blasting-cap which woud set off the dynamite.

Nobel’s new invention was a success! Nitroglycerine could now be used safely, although for added protection, sticks of dynamite were often frozen solid in transportation as an extra preventive against accidental explosions. The name ‘Dynamite’ comes from the greek word for ‘Power’, from which we also get words such as ‘Dynamo’ and ‘Dynamic’.

Using and Storing Dynamite

Dynamite was fantastically popular. Finally, construction-workers and builders and engineers had a powerful and safe explosive. You buried the sticks of dynamite, stuck in a blasting-cap and a fuse, lit the fuse and let the explosives take their course.

Of course, Dynamite wasn’t always used for peaceful purposes such as construction and public works. Dynamite, as an all-purpose explosive, was easy to buy. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the availability of dynamite meant that it was used for several murder and assassination-plots. One of the most famous was in 1880, when a carpenter planted dynamite under a dining-room in the Winter Palace in Russia, intent on killing Tsar Alexander II. The assassination was a failure, but it showed just how accessible high explosives could be, to the wrong kind of person.

It was because of publicity like this that Alfred Nobel decided to create the prizes that now bear his name.

The Nobel Prizes

First awarded in 1901, the Nobel Prizes are awarded each year, to those who have made outstanding achievements in the areas of Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Medicine and most famously of all, world peace; the famous Nobel Peace Prize.

The prizes were created as a direct result of the unforseen and disastrous consequences that Alfred Nobel had created with his invention: Dynamite. What had been created to help mankind build and construct and advance society, was also being used to destroy it! Horrified by this and troubled by the kind of legacy that he might leave on the world, Nobel instructed in his last will and testament that his fortune was to be used to create a series of prizes to be given to those people who conferred ‘the greatest benefit to mankind’ in the categories listed above – Physics, Chemistry, Physiology and Medicine, Literature and World Peace. Nobel died in December, 1896 at the age of 63, about a week before Christmas. Apart from a few years during the Second World War, Nobel Prizes have been awarded each year for the past 110 years.